Tag Archives: Autonomous vehicle

The path to high GNSS accuracy

For fully autonomous driving to become reality, several technologies will have to reach maturity and be rolled out in concert. One of them is affordable, scalable, and reliable high precision positioning.

The past decades have seen substantial improvements in the performance of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology. In the early 2000s, the time it took to get a first accurate position went from minutes to under thirty seconds. In the latter half of the decade, receiver sensitivity improved dramatically – from -130 dBm to -167 dBm. By 2015, the number of functional positioning satellite constellations had gone from one global constellation in 2000 (the USA’s GPS) to four (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo). This opened the doors to multi-constellation GNSS receivers. The satellite signals, too, have been modernized, and as of 2018, multi-band GNSS will become affordable. These advances set the stage for the next big theme in GNSS: achieving decimeter- or centimeter-level accuracy. Read more…

The path towards the autonomous vehicles passes through the European satellites

The future of the autonomous driving is “made-in-Europe”. The European Agency for the global navigation satellite systems (GSA) has kicked-off ESCAPE, a three-year and 5.4 M€ project to exploit the services offered by Galileo in the field of the automated driving. ESCAPE will coordinate some of the most relevant industrial and research institutions in Europe to create a positioning engine for safety-critical applications on the road, namely- the applications involving highly automated driving. Read more…

Satellite navigation at core of future connected car systems

driverless-car-02At the joint “Insurance Telematics” and “Connected Cars” conference in London, vehicle manufacturers, software engineers, public authorities and many more heard how GNSS and internet-enabled vehicles are changing the road transport landscape.

Major vehicle manufacturers are now delivering motor vehicles with connected services for drivers, including real-time traffic and weather reports and accident or road works warnings. More applications are on the way, and the technology systems that support them will enable the increasing number of autonomous vehicles that will soon be cruising down our roads and highways. Read more…

EU Galileo and Japanese QZSS combination pushes driverless cars

The Japanese government and the European Union plan to connect their global positioning systems to speed up the development of autonomous driving technology.

If all goes as planned, Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System and the EU’s Galileo will be linked as early as 2018. The link will be a common digital language that the systems will use to transmit information. This will allow driverless cars and autoparts developed for the Japanese market to be shipped and used outside Japan. Read more…